Smithsonian Folkways

Avant-garde music is an umbrella term for boundary-pushing practices that challenge prevailing norms of harmony, rhythm, timbre, form, and performance. It privileges experimentation, conceptual rigor, and a willingness to reframe what counts as music at all. Historically tied to early 20th‑century artistic modernism, avant-garde music introduced atonality, the emancipation of noise, and new forms of notation and process. It embraces indeterminacy, extended techniques, electronics, spatialization, and multimedia performance, treating sound as material to be sculpted, questioned, and reinvented.

Big band is a large-ensemble style of jazz and popular dance music built around brass, reed, and rhythm sections playing arranged parts. Typical instrumentation includes five saxophones (often doubling clarinet/flute), four trombones, four trumpets, and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, upright bass, and drum set. The music emphasizes swing rhythms, call-and-response between sections, riff-based writing, and dramatic shout choruses, while leaving space for improvised solos. Born in American ballrooms and theaters, big band became the sound of the Swing Era, providing both music for dancing and a platform for sophisticated arranging and orchestration that shaped much of 20th‑century jazz and popular music.

Bluegrass is a style of American roots music that coalesced in the Appalachian region in the 1940s around Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. It is defined by all‑acoustic instrumentation (typically fiddle, mandolin, 5‑string banjo, guitar, and upright bass, with dobro often added), virtuosic ensemble interplay, and a distinctive “high lonesome” lead vocal timbre supported by tight three‑part harmonies. Musically, bluegrass fuses African American blues and jazz phrasing with Anglo‑Celtic ballads and dance tunes. Hallmarks include driving tempos, syncopated 3‑finger banjo rolls (popularized by Earl Scruggs), off‑beat mandolin “chop” backbeats, boom‑chuck guitar rhythm, two‑beat bass, and alternating instrumental “breaks.” Repertoires mix breakdowns and fiddle tunes with narrative ballads, gospel numbers, and contemporary songwriter material.

Country blues—also called rural blues or folk blues—is the earliest widely documented form of the blues, rooted in the everyday music-making of African Americans in the rural American South. It typically features a solo singer accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar, with flexible time, expressive vocal delivery, and abundant use of blue notes. While 12‑bar structures are common, country blues often stretches or compresses measures to fit the lyric, making phrasing elastic and conversational. Regional flavors emerged—Delta (driving, droning thumb bass and slide), Piedmont (ragtime‑inflected fingerpicking), and Texas (looser phrasing and single‑string leads)—but all share storytelling lyrics about work, travel, love, hardship, and spiritual longing.

Country gospel is a devotional branch of country music that weds rural American songcraft to Christian message and testimony. It features acoustic-forward instrumentation (guitars, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, pedal steel), plainspoken storytelling, and close vocal harmony drawn from shape-note singing and church quartets. Songs typically use simple, singable melodies and diatonic progressions in verse–chorus forms, emphasizing themes of salvation, hardship, hope, gratitude, and moral reflection. Popularized on early radio and barn-dance programs, it has remained a staple of country repertoire—from family groups and harmony duos to solo artists who intersperse sacred material within country albums and concerts.

Folk is a song-centered acoustic tradition rooted in community storytelling, everyday life, and social history. It emphasizes clear melodies, simple harmonies, and lyrics that foreground narrative, protest, and personal testimony. As a modern recorded genre, folk coalesced in the early-to-mid 20th century in the United States out of older ballad, work song, and rural dance traditions. It typically features acoustic instruments (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica), strophic song forms, and participatory singing (choruses, call-and-response).

Hindustani classical is the North Indian branch of the Indian classical tradition, centered on the concepts of raga (melodic framework) and tala (cyclical rhythm). It emphasizes improvisation within strict aesthetic and grammatical boundaries, unfolding a raga through a gradual, architected performance arc from free-rhythm exploration to metrically grounded elaboration. Performances typically proceed through an alap (slow, non-metrical exposition), jor and jhala (rhythmic intensification on plucked instruments), and a composed piece—bandish or gat—set to a tala cycle, followed by improvisations (vistar, tans, bol-bant) that resolve emphatically on the sam (first beat). Signature ornaments such as meend (glides), gamak (oscillation), and andolan (slow vibrato) articulate microtonal nuance (shruti). The style encompasses vocal genres like dhrupad and khyal, and instrumental idioms on sitar, sarod, sarangi, bansuri, and shehnai, supported by a sustaining drone (tanpura) and tabla or pakhawaj accompaniment. Beyond the concert hall, Hindustani classical has deeply informed sub-classical and popular forms across South Asia and, through mid-20th-century cultural exchange, popular and art music worldwide.

Jazz is an improvisation-centered music tradition that emerged from African American communities in the early 20th century. It blends blues feeling, ragtime syncopation, European harmonic practice, and brass band instrumentation into a flexible, conversational art. Defining features include swing rhythm (a triplet-based pulse), call-and-response phrasing, blue notes, and extended harmonies built on 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths. Jazz is as much a way of making music—spontaneous interaction, variation, and personal sound—as it is a set of forms and tunes. Across its history, jazz has continually hybridized, from New Orleans ensembles and big-band swing to bebop, cool and hard bop, modal and free jazz, fusion, and contemporary cross-genre experiments. Its influence permeates global popular and art music.

New Mexico music (música nuevomexicana) is a regional folk‑popular genre from the U.S. state of New Mexico. It blends centuries‑old Hispanic and Pueblo musical traditions with Western swing, country, rock ’n’ roll, norteño/conjunto, ranchera, cumbia, polka, and waltz dance forms. The result is a bilingual (Spanish/English) dance and song tradition strongly associated with Spanish‑speaking Nuevomexicanos. Typical ensembles combine accordion or keyboards with electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drum set, and often saxophone or brass; mariachi strings and trumpets appear in cross‑over settings. Songs range from lively polkas and cumbias to romantic boleros and ranchera ballads, characterized by singable melodies, close vocal harmonies, and lyrics about love, family, faith, fiestas, and New Mexican places and identity.

Old-time is a North American string-band tradition rooted in the rural South and Appalachia, where fiddles and banjos lead dance tunes, ballads, and breakdowns. It emphasizes a steady, trance-like groove for social dancing, ensemble playing over solos, and strong melodic riffs supported by drones and rhythmic ostinati. The sound blends British Isles balladry and fiddle repertory with African American banjo technique and rhythmic sensibilities. Tunes are commonly modal (Dorian, Mixolydian, Aeolian), arranged in two repeated strains (AABB), and played for extended durations to serve square and contra dancing. Vocals, when present, are often old ballads or topical songs delivered with a plain, direct style.

Persian classical (musiqi-e asil) is the art-music tradition of Iran centered on the modal system called dastgāh and its body of canonical melodies known as the radif. Performances are typically intimate and improvisation-forward, unfolding through a succession of gusheh (short melodic pieces) within a dastgāh, guided by recognizable cadential gestures (forud) and a central tone (shāhed). Its sound world features nuanced microtonal inflections using koron (lowered) and sori (raised) accidentals, fluid rhythmic freedom in avāz (non-metric improvisation), and contrasting metered forms like pishdarāmad, chahārmezrāb, tasnif (song), and reng (dance). Core instruments include tar, setar, kamancheh, santur, ney, and tombak (tonbak), with the human voice employing elaborate ornaments (tahrir). The repertoire draws on classical Persian poetry (Hafez, Rumi, Saadi), creating a contemplative, mystical, and deeply expressive aesthetic.

Polka is a lively Central European couple dance and musical style in a brisk 2/4 meter, characterized by its buoyant “oom‑pah” bass-chord accompaniment and bright, diatonic melodies. Originating in Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) in the early 19th century, it quickly became a pan-European craze before taking root across immigrant communities in the Americas. Ensembles typically feature accordion or button box/concertina, clarinet or saxophone, trumpets/trombone, tuba or string bass, and drum kit, with regional variants highlighting different lead voices and rhythmic feels. While the classical ballroom tradition codified polka into formal strains (often AABB with a contrasting trio), folk and popular styles favor singable tunes, simple I–IV–V harmonies, and tempos commonly around 115–135 BPM, inviting upbeat social dancing and communal celebration.

American folk music is a broad family of traditional and vernacular musics that developed in the United States from the 19th century onward, drawing on British Isles balladry, African American spirituals and work songs, Native American traditions, and frontier songs. It is typically acoustic, emphasizing voice and narrative over virtuoso display. Common instruments include acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, dulcimer, and upright bass. Forms are often strophic with repeated refrains, and melodies frequently use pentatonic or modal scales (Mixolydian, Dorian). Lyrical themes range from love, labor, faith, migration, and rural life to topical protest and social justice. Regional styles—such as Appalachian ballads and string-band music, cowboy songs of the West, maritime shanties of New England, Cajun and Creole influences in Louisiana, and Midwestern and Southwestern dance tunes—sit under the umbrella of American folk, which later fed revivals and singer‑songwriter traditions.

World music is a broad, industry-coined umbrella for traditional, folk, and contemporary popular styles from around the globe that fall outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream. The label emerged in the 1980s as a retail and marketing category to group diverse regional musics for international distribution. Musically, it spans acoustic and electric instrumentation; modal, pentatonic, and microtonal pitch systems; and rhythms ranging from cyclical grooves and polyrhythms to asymmetrical meters. While the term can obscure local specificity, it also facilitated cross-cultural collaboration, festivals, and recordings that brought regional genres to wider audiences.

Navajo (Diné) music is the traditional and contemporary music of the Navajo Nation, centered on the voice and deeply connected to ceremony, community, and the Diné philosophy of hózhó (balance, beauty, harmony). Core repertoires include powerful ceremonial song cycles (such as Blessingway, Nightway/Yeibichai, Enemyway), seasonal and life‑cycle songs, social dance songs, and, in modern times, popular and hybrid forms ranging from peyote songs to rock, punk, hip hop, and flute-based instrumental music. Musically, Navajo song is primarily monophonic and vocally driven, often using limited ranges, descending contours, and anhemitonic pentatonic or closely related modal patterns. Texts are in Diné Bizaad (Navajo) and/or vocables; performance may be a cappella or supported by frame/basket drums, water drums (in Native American Church contexts), and rattles. Flute melodies—adopted and localized—add a lyrical, reflective strand. Above all, songs function as living knowledge, aligning people, land, and the sacred.